CategoriesStyles and Movements
Bengal School of Art
Early 20th-century Indian painting movement that looked to Mughal, Rajput, Ajanta and East Asian traditions to build a modern national art.
No works indexed yet · 7 related artists
No open-access works for Bengal School of Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
In 1905, as protests against the British partition of Bengal swept Calcutta, Abanindranath Tagore painted Bharat Mata, a saffron-robed, four-armed woman who became an emblem of the Swadeshi movement. The picture shows the Bengal School's approach: soft watercolour washes, modest scale, a devotional mood and subjects from Indian history, epic and religion, rather than the academic oil painting of colonial art schools.
Abanindranath developed the style with E.B. Havell, principal of the government art school in Calcutta, who championed Mughal and Rajput painting. Contact with the Japanese thinker Okakura Kakuzō and visiting Japanese painters encouraged a layered wash technique. Nandalal Bose, the leading pupil, studied the Ajanta murals and later shaped art teaching at Santiniketan; Abdur Rahman Chughtai carried a refined, linear version to Lahore. Gaganendranath Tagore experimented with Cubist fragmentation. By the 1940s younger artists found it too nostalgic, but its search for an Indian modernism shaped what followed.
Related artists
More in Styles and Movements
Black Arts Movement
Black Mountain College
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D960&w=3840&q=75)